Frankly,
depakid, I've seen you make a rather large number of predictions along the lines that the pro-RKBA crowd are overreaching this time, or the next time, well, really soon anyway. And every time, you give little evidence that you have the slightest clue what you're on about. You claimed the NRA was "overreaching this time" by suing the City of San Francisco (here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=223092&mesg_id=223119), on the basis that you thought the City ordinances were reasonable (and you thought the SCOTUS would think so too). Newsflash: whether or not the City's regulations are reasonable doesn't enter into it, because the City of San Francisco
does not have the legal authority to make that decision. California, like 43 other states, has a preemption statute, which reserves the authority to regulate firearms to the state government and prohibits local authorities from making their own rules.
As for the notion that "eventually there'll be a backlash," what makes you think that
what's going on now isn't the backlash? That is, the backlash against four decades of encroachment at the state and federal level on the right of citizens to acquire and possess the most effective means of protecting themselves and their loved ones. You know what? I'm an immigrant to the US from the Netherlands, and I
used to be a proponent of gun control. The main thing that changed my mind was the SCOTUS' verdict in
Castle Rock, CO v. Gonzales. Essentially, the Court ruled (7-2) that Jessica Gonzales could not sue the Castle Rock Police Department for failing to lift a finger to arrest her estranged husband after he'd abducted their three daughters, despite the fact that both Colorado state law and the court order she possessed legally obliged them to. While Castle Rock PD kept its collective thumb up its ass for several hours, her husband murdered the three girls.
Now, this is not intended as a slam on cops; I've known quite a few in my time, from a variety of countries, and most of them became cops out of a genuine desire "to serve and protect." But when the state declares that it has no responsibility to protect you, and that even if the state fails to make so much as a good faith effort to protect you (even when it has explicitly promised to do so) you have no avenue of redress, that state has thereby abdicated the authority to deny you the means to protect yourself. That's Political Science 101: authority is the legitimate exercise of power, and that legitimacy is achieved by accepting responsibility. Responsibility without power is impotence; power without responsibility is tyranny. Neither is desirable in a government.
Gun control--not just in the US, but everywhere--has consistently failed to do anything to reduce violent crime, or reduce the availability of firearms to the criminal element. Gun control is a cosmetic measure, it's what a government does to be seen to be doing something, rather than actually either addressing the cause of the problem, or admitting they can't. Remember Tony Blair's slogan, back in 1993, "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"? So much for
that promise. Not that I'm one of those idiots who goes for the
post hoc ergo propter hoc that the increasing restrictions on weapons caused the increase in violent crime in the UK, but they obviously did sod-all to stop it. Evidently, New Labour didn't have a clue what "the causes of crime" actually were, or if they did, they couldn't work out how to get tough on them. (Not that I think for a second that the Conservatives could have done--or could do--a better job; the reason Blair was in a position to issue that soundbite while still in opposition was because the Major government, like the Thatcher government before it, didn't have a clue how to deal with rising crime either.)
Gun control is what you do instead of something useful. Here in the US, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed to prevent a recurrence of the assassinations of the JFK, RFK and MLK and the disorder of the late 1960s, and yet the measures failed to prevent Reagan getting shot or prevent the violence of the "Crack wars" of the 1980s. In the Netherlands, 80 years of stringent gun laws failed to prevent the first political assassination in over 400 years (Pim Fortuyn), the shooting of Theo van Gogh, or the launching of several explosive projectiles at the court building where an underworld figure (Willem Holleeder) was about to go on trial. Gun control laws succeed mainly in disarming those individuals who overwhelmingly weren't going to be a problem. And every time gun controls measures fail to prevent the kind of occurrence they were supposed to prevent, every gun control advocate
ever says "hm, since that didn't work, maybe we should try something else." No, they call for more of the same stuff that failed to work in the first place. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Sure, we get the seemingly incessant barrage in here of stories of kids getting hold of dad's unsecured gun and shooting a friend or relative, but in the grand scheme of things, they're a drop in a very large bucket. More American children under the age of 10 die each year from being backed over by reversing cars (about 105) than die from unintentional gunshot wounds (about 80). Sure, you can argue that every death is one too many, and on a visceral level (certainly as the father of a 3 year-old) I'll agree, but let's be honest, none of us
really believes that. If we did, we'd stop using cars and bath tubs and electricity and drain cleaner; we accept the risks that come with these items because, to our mind, the advantages outweigh the small risk of harm that might result from their presence and/or use. And there's no shortage of items that people want and have and use that they
don't actually need, including ones that are dangerous. Nobody
needs a sports car (negligible room for passengers and cargo, and capable of speeds that aren't legal in most places), or a private swimming pool (you can use the municipal one, surely), or a bath tub (your kid can't drown in a shower cubicle, and remember Andrea Yates?). And yet we tolerate these potentially lethal goods because we, collectively as a society, don't think the deaths that
might be prevented from banning them are worth the price of stomping all over people's freedoms.
Well, maybe gun owners want some of those freedoms back, too, seeing as how removing them didn't do any good.
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